Supercomputer predicts how far England will go at Qatar World Cup and rates their chances of winning tournament

England kick off their World Cup campaign against Iran on Monday afternoon before facing Wales and the United States in their other two group fixtures.

The BetVictor supercomputer has rated England’s chances of finishing top of their group at 45 per cent while their probability of making the round of 16 is 73 per cent.

Southgate’s side have been given an eight per cent chance of winning the World Cup, leaving them as fourth favourites behind Brazil (14 per cent), Belgium (13 per cent), and Argentina (10 per cent).

England are forecast to draw France in the last eight and to win the game on penalties before losing to Belgium in the semi-finals. Brazil are predicted to win the tournament by beating Belgium on penalties.

On how their supercomputer methodology works, BetVictor state: “At the heart of the supercomputer is a match simulator that uses Poisson distribution to generate score lines, the mean value given to the Poisson distributor is based on an algorithm that assesses the skill level of teams in addition to past goals scored data from previous World Cups. Games are then simulated thousands of times to calculate match outcomes and tournament probabilities.

“To predict how many games went to extra time or penalties we evaluated tournament data from the past five World Cups. 35 per cent of Knockout games went to extra time, and 57.33 per cent of those games went to penalties – these probabilities were coded into the model for the KO stage.

“To determine the specific games that went to extra time or penalties, unique probabilities were calculated during the simulation itself using a formula to generate an assigned probability to fixtures based on the relative skill gap between teams. For example, if the teams facing were a similar skill level the fixture had a higher probability of going to extra time and penalties than other KO games in the same tournament simulation.”